There is great variation in the sizes of continents; Asia is more than five times as large as Australia. The largest island in the world, Greenland, is only about one-fourth the size of Australia. The continents differ sharply in their degree of compactness. Africa has the most regular coastline and, consequently, the lowest ratio of coastline to total area. Europe is the most irregular and indented and has by far the highest ratio of coastline to total area.

The continents are not distributed evenly over the surface of the globe. If a hemisphere map centred in northwestern Europe is drawn, most of the world’s land area can be seen to lie within that hemisphere. More than two-thirds of the Earth’s land surface lies north of the Equator, and all the continents except Antarctica are wedge shaped, wider in the north than they are in the south.

The distribution of the continental platforms and ocean basins on the surface of the globe and the distribution of the major landform features have long been among the most intriguing problems for scientific investigation and theorizing. Among the many hypotheses that have been offered as explanation are: (1) the tetrahedral (four-faced) theory, in which a cooling earth assumes the shape of a tetrahedron by spherical collapse; (2) the accretion theory, in which younger rocks attached to older shield areas became buckled to form the landforms; (3) the continental-drift theory, in which an ancient floating continent drifted apart; and (4) the convection-current theory, in which convection currents in the Earth’s interior dragged the crust to cause folding and mountain making.

Geological and seismological evidence accumulated in the 20th century indicates that the continental platforms do “float” on a crust of heavier material that forms a layer completely enveloping the Earth. Each continent has one of the so-called shield areas that formed 2 billion to 4 billion years ago and is the core of the continent to which the remainder (most of the continent) has been added. Even the rocks of the extremely old shield areas are older in the centre and younger toward the margins, indicating that this process of accumulation started early. In North America the whole northeast quarter of the continent, called the Canadian, or Laurentian, Shield, is characterized by the ancient rocks of what might be called the original continent. In Europe the shield area underlies the eastern Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. The Guiana Highlands of South America are the core of that continent. Much of eastern Siberia is underlain by the ancient rocks, as are western Australia and southern Africa. See alsocontinental drift.

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...and landmass collisions. Subduction lead to the creation of island arcs and Andean-type (formed by subduction at the continental margin) granitic batholiths. In addition, the collision of arcs and continents could now give rise to both sutures with ophiolites and to Himalayan-type (formed by continent-to-continent collision) thrust belts with abundant crustal-melt granites. These were key...

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On a globe, continents are the easiest things to spot. A continent is a large solid area of land. Earth has seven continents. In order from largest to smallest, they are Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. Sometimes people think of Europe and Asia as a single continent called Eurasia. Australia is part of a larger area called Oceania or Australasia. It includes many islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The most prominent features of Earth are the ocean basins and the continents. The continents are the planet’s large, continuous landmasses. These landmasses and their major landforms, such as plains, plateaus, and mountain ranges, have a high degree of permanence. They are the products of forces that act over extremely long periods of time.

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